Is Christianity Nothing but a Power Game?

I just came back from summiting the highest peak in the country, Mount Apo. I first attempted to organize this hike back in mid-2021. I was living in a place with a view of the mountain back then, and it was beckoning me everyday.

It was not meant to be. At least not until I decided otherwise seven weeks ago.

I don't know what spirit moved me then, but the thought of continuing to live in Davao without climbing Apo felt almost like a personal insult. Perhaps this was because I have been deep into the writing of my first novel, Rajah Versus Conquistador, which made me inhabit the mind of a precolonial Austronesian Big Man almost daily. Rajah Humabon was not the kind of man who let fate shape him.

I used to be a professional project manager, and the first book I wrote was entitled How to Turn Ideas Into Reality: Project Management for Entrepreneurship and Creative Work, so the execution wasn't the hard part. I just had to throw some time and money at the problem. It was a question of desire and priority. Even as I was hiking up from the village at the foot of Apo into its wilderness, I was questioning whether I was wasting three days I could have used for writing.

I wouldn't have been as torn as I was if I remembered what I wrote in the chapter "Cultivate Serendipity" in How to Turn Ideas Into Reality. If you've read my previous post, you probably got a sense that I'm a bit of a productivity nerd. My natural tendency is to let Apollo have his way with Dionysus.

Here's an open secret among writers in the "personal growth" genre: we're really just giving advice for our future selves. Let me quote my past self's advice to present me:

In the work of writing fiction, one also needs to have a mix of order and chaos. The daily routine of producing words, paragraphs, and chapters must be spiked with escapes outside of those constraints. A grueling hike with a heavy backpack across three days, with short and uncomfortable bouts of sleep in between, turned out to be the perfect counterbalance to my Apollonian regime. At 5am after the day we summited Apo, I found the solution to this central scene in the encounter between Rajah Humabon and Ferdinand Magellan:

This is from Antonio Pigafetta's account of Ferdinand Magellan's death. My guiding principle in the novel is that I'll be as faithful as possible to the historical and anthropological record, and go as wild as possible in what is not known. In this case, Humabon must weep in the story. But as to why he wept—I sense that this will be a central theme of the book.

My wormhole to the mind of a 16th-century Austronesian Big Man was a combination of Nietzsche (by way of Girard's critique), Tom Holland's Dominion, and Sahlins and Graeber's On Kings. Since I grew up in a thoroughly Christian world, I had to perform a kind of mind surgery to imagine a world without Christ. It has been exhausting. I think I now understand what C.S. Lewis meant by this comment of his on the writing of The Screwtape Letters, wherein we see the world through the letters of a devil.

The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch.

Humabon, however, was a man, and I feel it is aesthetically cringe (a baduy move) to demonize him. He must make sense (and feel right) from his own worldview. His mind is based on what I imagine Duterte's mind to be, but pre-Christian rather than post-Christian. He lives in a world where ritual human sacrifice and slave raiding are part of life. I don't think you can truly understand Humabon if you don't dive into this dark world. Thanks to Girard, I've been deep into the world of ritual sacrifice in the past couple of years, and my eventual thesis for the MA Anthropology I'm currently in the middle of will probably be on this topic. Incidentally, while I was in the base camp of Mount Apo, I received an email from the editor of a Girard-focused journal. He gave me the go signal to start the formal processing of the publishing of this paper I submitted!

Here’s what I submitted https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vLp6ddbCb7adtyTn_EoNvN7MnBJoAP-8/edit

Why would a man like Humabon weep at the death of Magellan? In the story, this is his Sun Tzu-style victory. Again, this needs to be wild and psychopathic. It can't just be because he was mourning for a friend or something a normie would do. Here are some ideas:

• He was overcome by the aesthetics of his move (the poetry of power by a master player admiring his handiwork)

• The child in him, which he imprisoned as he chose psychopathy, wept as this death mirrors the murder he committed to become Rajah (this child figure is developed in chapter two, a kind of pathological IFS).

The best option would be to (also?) reflect the clash of a real-life Bronze Age Pervert with a Christian psychopath (i.e., a conquistador), but I could not figure out how to pull this off.

I found the answer just before the sun rose. We hiked for around 14 hours the day prior, and that night, I slept like a champion for eight hours: 7:30 pm to 3:30 am. After that, my mind was so refreshed that I had to get out of the tent and start my day even though it was pitch black. Eventually, I had to pick a book to read. David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite just happened to be on the first page of the kindle I brought with me. It turns out to be a response to Nietzsche's critique of Christianity (maybe).

I'm only at the introduction, and I've highlighted so many passages. Here's one that sort of captures the tension between Humabon and Magellan, or more accurately, the clash between the psychofauna behind them:

When Humabon, steeped as he is in the epistemology of power, encounters Christianity, he sees it as a tool for domination, perhaps a clever new psyops to control the rising timawa (or something). To him, it is power games all the way down. Magellan is also fluent in the idiom of power, but he is a true believer in (Christian) knighthood. Humabon sees this and uses it to trap him into fighting an unwinnable battle (60 vs 1,000). Checkmate. Humabon couldn't believe that a man would do such a thing. Magellan does the unbelievable and sacrifices his life rather than betray his principles and his Lord. He's playing a totally different game. Humabon catches a glimpse of a world wherein Magellan's faith is actually true, and he is moved to tears. Just a glimpse, though. This story is a tragedy. Soon enough, he's back to being the Orang Besar. The closing chapter is the supper with the twenty-four Europeans who accept his invitation for a send-off, and where they are massacred.

In my previous post, I compared the work of writing to building a castle. Claude has become my brick-making machine, and I now can spend more time on work that only a human can do, like waking up in the middle of the jungle before dawn and receiving a revelation. The paragraph above does not give it justice, but I now know how this part of the book should feel. The advantage of a story versus an essay is that you have more tools to relay an experience like this. I hope I can pull it off.

Actually… Hart, David Bentley. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003.